In the recent times, you all must be witnessing the rise of short format content on different social media handles and video sharing forums, but did you ever think why they are promoting this? Well, we will try to find that out.
Since June 29, 2020 when the biggest platform of creating short videos TikTok was banned in India by the Government, there was a serious market gap which could be filled by entrepreneurs by introducing something which could replace TikTok because short videos length less than a minute was booming, it became so easy for creators to showcase their talent be it dancing, singing, small magic tricks or any other creative stuff with minimal bar of technology intervention, anyone with a phone could create and upload videos. Earlier, the only platform available was YouTube which only promoted longer videos which required scripting, recording, editing, uploading and various other things. These were the reasons why TikTok (formerly Musically) got popular.
Now from a viewer perspective, it is easy to hold your attention for a minute rather than 10 minutes and therefore TikTok got audience. Now, when the app got banned, many apps tried to take over its mantle and made their own app and some even succeeded but very less could stay in the race because they did not add their own uniqueness in the app, and this is where YouTube and Instagram stepped in. In September 2020, YouTube introduced a new feature in the app called YouTube Shorts to promote people to upload short format content through YouTube thus increasing their traffic and which ultimately gives them profit. Nowadays, you will see at least 10 videos in the trending section which are Shorts. Indian audience most of the times do not watch English content and even if they do, they rarely come on the trending tab (except MrBeast, Dude Perfect…) but I recently saw a random boy “decoding” a magic trick who had uploaded 5 Shorts out of which 3 were trending in India. He had explosive growth in number of subscribers from 17k to 1M in less than 72 hours which is pretty insane. This certainly is unfair to the creators who spend hours and sometimes days to produce that one video. YouTube should create a different section for trending Shorts videos so that long format content also gets its due recognition.
Courtesy: YouTube Blog
How can we not forget the Instagram Reels which certainly took over TikTok and which is most certainly one reason for the spike in downloads which currently is above 1B and it is no joke. Instagram had launched Reels in August 2020 and is promoting reels more than its own IGTV videos, the older 1 min videos are seldom found and seen to be created, a different tab has been created. There is no problem with that, but the problem is it is not recommending posts of users which is the sole reason why people are there. Also, it is seen that some women are seen exploiting the bugs by promoting inappropriate photographs through reels which are otherwise detected and deleted by AI of Instagram.
Courtesy: Embedsocial
Concluding, I just want to say it is okay to promote new ideas but by losing your originality and putting at stake your main idea might result backfiring.
Disclaimer: Images used are only for educational and recreational purposes. Credits goes to the respective owners of the images.
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